Republican Johnny Tacherra is in Washington, D.C. at the orientation for new members of Congress, but he’s no longer in the lead for the 16th Congressional District seat. Fresno County updated its vote count Wednesday afternoon, and incumbent Fresno Democrat Jim Costa — behind in his reelection bid since election night more than a week ago — took a slim, 86-vote lead over Tacherra.

Why, you ask, is Lady M doing promos with Penguins?Simple; after a brutal round of campaigning for losers in the midterms she felt the need to get her mojo back. So she put on her big girl dress,and threw her multiple assets into her good works programs for the week:First she honored art teachers for after school programs where kids can learn things like animation, then she appeared with Doc McStuffins, a Disney character of color who takes care of a batch of stuffed animals.Then she appeared at a Joining Forces seminar to address women veterans transitioning to civilian life:If...

A new Gallup poll shows that the majority of Americans don't want President Barack Obama calling all the shots anymore. Americans say by a large margin that they'd rather Obama back off and let Republicans take the lead in the new Congress than the other way around. The poll supports Republican claims that last week's midterm elections were in fact a referendum on the president - an assessment the White House has forcibly denied both before and after the president's party was walloped at the ballot box. ......... just 36 percent of respondents to Gallup's latest survey said they wanted...

If you were observing American elections from the outside, you might be asking yourself the following: Can't these people make up their minds? Four out of the last five elections (2006, 2008, 2010 and now 2014) were "wave" elections in which one party won a sweeping victory. They elect a president of one party, then two years later almost inevitably give the other party a huge victory in the midterm election. Why do they expect things to change? Good question. It's always dangerous to speak of a country of 319 million as having a singular will, or of an election...

Staggering statistics that show nearly a half-million people were caught trying to enter the U.S. illegally -- and more than half were not Mexican, a number far higher than in 2013 -- reportedly were posted on a U.S. government website for just a few hours last month before being taken down. According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, the numbers were posted on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website on Oct. 10 for roughly five hours. The dramatic numbers raised questions over whether they were yanked to protect the administration before key midterm elections. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told...

As an accompanying piece to my Midterm analysis located here http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3223860/posts I wanted to maybe give some positive news to those real conservatives who, while happy the Dems have been kicked to the curb, are annoyed that the establishment seems to have 'won the day'. Yes, the establishment robbed us of many high profile primary races, with Mike Simpson hanging on in Idaho as the most liberal Republican of that delegation, Boehner stooge James Lankford winning the senate nod from Oklahoma, and of course the despicable ruination of Chris McDaniel in Mississippi to save the dribbling Cochran. But in the...

When you suffer a defeat, sometimes the only thing you can do is crawl into your dark place and stay there until you’re ready to come back out and get on with your life. Understandably, many Democrats seem to be going through that process after Tuesday’s midterm elections resulted in massive gains for Congressional Republicans. The GOP retained power over the House, took control of the Senate and further diminished President Obama‘s relevancy. That’s a lot to take in. Here are five ways Democrats are consoling themselves: 1. Denying the election’s impact, as CNN’s Sally Kohn and MSNBC’s Joy Reid...

In the following post, I am going to go through what happened last night for those finding it hard to follow, perhaps because they don't know who is who etc. I will go systematically through the highlights and lowlights of the governor's races, US Senate races, US House races, and state legislature makeup, picking out the ones I was watching out for in particular. I will then state the big winners and losers of the night in general Finally, my opinion on where we should go next, how to improve on successes and not repeat failures. Without further ado, and...

Having emerged from an Election Day that many Republicans only dreamed of, the Senate Republicans’ campaign chairman was already looking forward to a Senate starting to function again. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., told a home state radio station that frustration with the lack of legislative activity contributed to his seeking the campaign job in the first place. “This place has been run, for the four years I’ve been in the United States Senate, with the goal of doing nothing,” the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee said on KNSS. “Boy, this place better change. It’s why I was willing...

Obama is relegated to a reactive presidency, except to the extent that he can go around Congress and use unconstitutional executive orders in lieu of passing legislation The American public realized not long after the 2012 election that they had blown it. Given the opportunity to fire Barack Obama and turn the federal government back in a wise direction, they should have seized the moment and done just that. Instead, they got caught up nonsense like Big Bird and “binders full of women”, and in not liking rich, CEO-ish Republicans, and as a result they dropped the ball and stuck...

Democrats on Wednesday morning began sorting through the wreckage of disastrous midterm elections in which losses eclipsed even their worst fears. The scale of the defeats, taken together, was breathtaking: a Senate majority lost, over a dozen House seats swept away, and Democrats ousted from governorsÂ’ mansions across the country. The drubbing is sure to spark a round of soul-searching as Democrats ponder whether President Obama is to blame Â— or whether something deeper has gone wrong in the party that could threaten its chances of retaining the White House in 2016. Â“This is where the administration has to take...

Despite signs pointing to Republican gains in Tuesday’s midterm elections, White House aides said President Obama won’t change his leadership style because the contests in red states don’t represent a “true national election.” With the GOP in striking distance of regaining control of the Senate, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday that “the vast majority of [Senate races] are actually taking place in states that the president did not win in the last presidential election.” And he said the Republican-friendly nature of this year’s electoral map would be a reason for the White House to limit any lessons...

So, if you were a fruit, what kind of fruit would you be? Barry thought he was a grape:Unfortunately, with his root stock, Barry’s more of a blackberry: small, prickly, seedy and filled with pith.Butt shiny!And while you can make wine from blackberries, it doesn’t age well. I’ll let Michael Goodwin at the NYPost explain: The presidency is sinking, but we are expected to believe that only the president is blameless.We are witnessing the total collapse of a bad idea. Obamaism, a quasi-socialist commitment to a more powerful government at home and an abdication of American leadership around the world,...

Democrats may be making their last stand in Arkansas. At the beginning of the cycle, Democrats touted a dream ticket that could help rally the party back to relevance after a series of stinging losses in the state. They cheered Sen. Mark Pryor’s (D) centrist profile and strong family name. In the governor’s race, they hoped former Rep. Mike Ross’s long string of successes in conservative southwest Arkansas would boost him. But months later, Pryor has trailed freshman Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) for much of the summer in the Razorback State and former Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) has had a...

President Barack Obama had an approval rating of just 38 percent as of late September and he is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. This week, the man who once filled arenas like a rock star suffered the indignity of Wisconsin Democrats walking out on him as he stumped for another struggling Democrat, Mary Burke. Obama’s visit to Wisconsin coincided with the disappearance of Burke’s modest lead in statewide polls....... ......The atmosphere has got to be pretty glum in the White House and in various leftist hothouses. The Daily Caller wants to help. Here, then, is a...

No kidding? We had all year to plan for Halloween and this is the best we could do? It looks more like a display at your local Dollar Store than the People’s House (no disrespect to the Dollar Store intended).Well, you can sort of understand how this happened; Lady M has been so busy campaigning for people she barely knows An exhausted Lady M, campaigning for what’s-his-name in Connecticutand Big Guy has been so busy not campaigning for people who barely know him.Meanwhile, lest there still be any doubt in your mind, the Fourth Estate officially sold out yesterday in...

Democrats have lost their grip on Hispanic voters heading into Election Day—and in turn could lose the Senate because of them. Even though Latinos split heavily for their party in 2012, mounting evidence suggests Hispanics could sit the midterms out after immigration reform has fallen from the White House agenda. "There's no question it's going to affect Democrats in this midterm. There's no one to blame but Democrats themselves," said Arturo Carmona, executive director of Hispanic engagement group Presente Action. A Pew poll out Wednesday revealed Democrats suffered an eight-point drop in support from Hispanic voters nationwide since 2010, down...

Harry Reid’s caucus is running from him on the campaign trail, but that doesn’t mean a revolt is in the works — yet. The majority leader has twisted the Senate into a pretzel all year to protect his vulnerable members, but the Nevada Democrat is now facing skepticism on the campaign trail from some of those same Democrats, as well as from some would-be newcomers. And there’s at least one scenario that could force his hand. Still, there’s that old saying: You can’t beat somebody with nobody, and so far, none of the senators who might have the chops to...

Republicans are bullish that they will win control of the Senate, make small gains in the House and retain many governor’s offices this year. But just over two weeks from Election Day, fears about Ebola and Islamic State militants, along with sudden, surprising scrambles in key states, have added new volatility to the 2014 campaign. The political climate clearly favors Republicans, buoyed by President Obama’s record-low popularity and a voter-enthusiasm advantage. However, the kind of wave that lifted Republicans in 1994 and 2010 has eluded them, in part because the GOP brand also is damaged. Voters are restive and dissatisfied...

President Obama is taking time out from his much-trumpeted "year of action" to observe a period more important to his Democratic allies in Congress: the season of campaigning.. One by one, the Obama administration is setting aside key priorities, in the hope that voters won't do the same to his fellow Democrats. Immigration reform, once deemed a pressing back-to-school item, will wait at least until the winter holidays. Enrollment in Obamacare will start six weeks later than last year. The climate will warm at the same rate, with new regulations pending. The latest addition to the not-to-do list came this...

"But make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them."Can we suck these eggs any harder?Today is your 4 week warning, people: the midterms are on November 4th. In order to assist you with your decisions I was going to recap all of Big Guy’s achievements during his first 3 historic quarters of play.Butt I see that Don Surber has already done that for us: nearly a trillion dollar stimulus that didn’t stimulate, a Cash for Clunkers program that was a clunker, Solyndra Solar which sunset shortly after the loan was gone, Obamacare – need...

One of the biggest surprises on the midterm campaign trail is hearing President Obama echo President Reagan’s famous question by asking voters whether “you are better off than you were four years ago.” The question is the hammer in Obama’s toolbox for nailing down his Democratic majority in the Senate in this year’s midterm election. “By almost every economic measure, we are better off today than we were when I took office,” the president said in a Sept. 19 speech to the Women’s Leadership Forum, sponsored by the Democratic National Committee. Speaking to a Labor Day rally of union workers...

Republicans may be poised for strong midterm gains, according to a new poll conducted for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal. Republicans hold a two-point lead nationwide on which party registered voters want to see in control of Congress, and that lead expands to 10 points in the Senate battleground states at 50 percent to 40 percent in the poll, conducted by Democratic polling firm Hart Research and Republican pollster Public Opinion Strategies. "With 56 days until Election Day, our poll provides greater insight into what is likely to happen, and the news is not good for the Democrats,"...

So where’s the wave? This is President Obama’s sixth-year-itch election. The map of states with contested Senate seats could hardly be better from the Republicans’ vantage point. And the breaks this year—strong candidates, avoidance of damaging gaffes, issues such as Obamacare and immigration that stir the party base—have mainly gone the GOP’s way, very unlike 2012

Public opinion polls, as they say, are a snapshot in time. And a glance at the polls today suggests that the 2014 midterm elections are shaping up to be good for Republicans, but a landslide does not appear to be in the offing. As of this writing, Real Clear Politics puts nine of this yearÂ’s 19 even competitive Senate races in the tossup column. Many of those races poll so tightly that it's impossible to make an accurate prediction about how they will shape up but, as RCP notes, the GOP is set today to pick up six net...

With the midterm elections six months away, Democrats are burdened by an uneven economic recovery and a stubbornly unpopular health care law. Perhaps equally important, Barack Obama’s political standing is in some respects weaker than it was at a comparable point in the 2010 campaign, which ended with the Republicans gaining a majority in the House. A national survey by the Pew Research Center and USA TODAY, conducted April 23-27 among 1,501 adults (including 1,162 registered voters), finds that 47% of registered voters support the Republican candidate in their district or lean Republican, while 43% favor the Democratic candidate or...

So says Chuck Morse, the author of Was Hitler a Leftist?. Morse predicts things will get uglier and crazier as the mid-term election approaches. Obama’s coalition of public employees, welfare recipients, old leftists and crony capitalists will fear a major setback as Republicans will be poised to take the Senate majority and increase their margin in the House. They have gone to the well too many times with the nasty and utterly bogus charges against their opponents of war on women racism and homophobia asserts Morse. Even many liberals, Morse speculates, who were once fooled by the cynical identity politics...

When Democratic National Committee operatives describe something as "undemocratic," they mean it's not good for the Democratic Party. "We believe that we should expand democracy -- that expanding democracy is good for the nation; it is good for our party," Democratic National Committee spokesman Mo Elleithee told reporters during a conference call in which he attacked "undemocratic" Republican voter ID laws and other state-level election laws.

(Reuters) - With Russia's incursion into Ukraine reviving Cold War-style tensions, President Barack Obama is at risk of suffering a blow to his credibility at a time when he can least afford it: as he tries to convince voters to stick with his fellow Democrats in congressional elections that will help shape his legacy. For five years, Obama has practiced a cautious approach to foreign policy crises, prizing sober diplomacy and the search for consensus over brinkmanship, in prolonged conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the deliberative style that Obama's team sees as a statesmanlike attitude in tune with Americans'...

At the end of 2013, the Washington Post’s electoral number-crunchers calculated that the Democrats had a 1 percent chance to win back the House of Representatives. Barely into 2014, that already seems pretty optimistic. In the last week, several Democratic representatives saw the writing on the wall and voted with their feet — or with their seat — and announced they will be retiring. One reason for that: The Obama administration is poised to give an incredible gift to the Republican party. Before the end of the year, up to 80 million people could see their health plans canceled. Economist...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) thinks the healthcare law will ultimately help Senate Democrats in 2014 even though some incumbents fear a backlash at the polls. “I think for sure it will be a net positive,” said Reid, who expects the law to become more of a political benefit as problems are smoothed out by Election Day. “I think so by then for sure.” Reid said feedback to the Obama administration from Democratic senators has helped improve the federal enrollment site HealthCare.gov since its disastrous launch in October. “It’s gotten significantly better, but it was significantly bad so it...

The GOP divide over the role of outside groups is heating up in the Senate, just days, after Speaker John Boehner railed that conservative organizations had “lost all credibility.” Several prominent GOP senators on Tuesday echoed Boehner’s (R-Ohio) frustration with those organizations, agreeing that outfits like Heritage Action and the Senate Conservatives Fund were out only for themselves and are hurting Republican efforts to take over both chambers of Congress. “I’ve said for a long time that there are some outside groups who do what they do solely to raise money,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). “I’m glad that people...

Late last night, the Obama administration announced that it was delaying a key component of Obamacare until 2015. It appears that the requirement that employers who employ 50 or more people are required to offer health insurance has been pushed back a full year. The administration is lying through their teeth when they had Mark Mazur, assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department, say, ""We have heard concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively. We have listened to your feedback. And we are taking action." Everyone with an...

Beware the Ides of March With the shellacking that President Obama and the Democrats suffered in the mid-terms combined with the evolving storm brewing for the President on the extensions of the Bush tax cuts, many in his own party are beginning to question the Presidents’ vision and leadership. Granted, history shows midterms tend to shift back to the party out of power although not to seismic level recently witnessed. I won’t bore the reader with further speculation to the causes as the reasons have been thoroughly debated in the media by now. More interesting is the percolating dissatisfaction with...

...it was the creation of the TARP fund by the outgoing Bush administration, combined with the Stimulus Act of the newly-sworn-in Obama administration, that in early 2009 fanned the embers of fiscal conservatism into the flames of the Tea Party...

During his run for the Presidency, Barack Obama pledged that, if elected, he would bring about "real change" both in America and in Washington DC. And, lo and behold, less than two years into his Presidency, and Obama has already fulfilled his campaign pledge. One only needs to read the following headline/article from the AP to realize that Obama has already ushered in the dramatic change that he promised to bring to the US and to Washington DC: From the AP: Obama lands back in CHANGED WashingtonPresident Barack Obama landed in a politically-changed Washington after 10 days abroad... Obama returned...

Liberals:President Obama, in August: Republicans “...have not come up with a single solitary, new idea to address the challenges of the American people. They don't have a single idea that's different from George Bush's ideas ... not one.” Obama in August: “They haven't come out with a single solitary idea that is different from policies that held sway for eight years before Democrats took over. Not a single policy difference that's discernable from [George W.] Bush. Not one.” President Obama: “And so my job is to make sure that I'm looking at all ideas that are on the table....

Did turnout push the Massachusetts elections back towards the Democrats? In the wake of statewide defeat last Tuesday, Republicans in the Bay State are trying to figure out what went wrong. The blizzard of emails amongst the Republican volunteers following an election in which Massachusetts voters rejected a slate of admirable Republican candidates is a sign that the volunteers will not need to conduct a postmortem — that is, a review following death. The Massachusetts GOP, the Massachusetts Tea Party movement, and the independent, conservative portion of the citizenry are not dead. Manifestly, their governing principle is the recognition that...

Although the meaning and ultimate result of the 2010 elections are still being debated, it is quite clear that the possibility of a conservative sweep during the midterms was not only anticipated by the Obama administration, it was planned-for, and but for a few key mistakes in execution of that plan, might have been averted — or at least significantly curbed.

If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as improbable fiction Twelfth Night III:4 The midterm elections are basically over and has left the Democrat Party shaken and demoralized, everyone except the leadership. Reid and Pelosi see their individual wins as an endorsement of their leadership, an attitude that is shared by President Obama. They the Undaunted Triumvirate of Marxism feel that the only failing on their behalf was to push forward without adequately explaining to the people of America the benefits and advantages of increased governmental control of their lives and how we will...

Early this year while the health care reform debate was raging, President Barack Obama declared that he'd "rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." In the wake of last week's midterm election results and the president’s reaction to them, a third option is now a very real possibility. Will a man who promised to fundamentally transform the country be remembered by history as a mere footnote; a one-term president whose only memorable achievement was being the first African American to hold the office?

\ Each of the 435 congressional districts is rescaled to have the same area. The white districts are too close to call (4 Nov 2010) or do not send voting delegates to the House (Washington DC). A comparison with the 2008 cartogram reveals not only that the Republicans made gains, but also where these occured. The next cartogram shows those districts that have changed parties.

Here is audio of Rush Limbaugh’s reaction this morning to the results of last night’s 2010 Midterm Election – “Wipe Out!” “It was a wipe out, and don’t let anyone tell you anything otherwise.”Rush played, “Ding-Dong, the Witch is Dead,” in honor of the end of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House! “This was a total rejection of the Obama Agenda. This was a total rejection of the Democrat Party.”

Although former President Bill Clinton has held more than 100 election events, his wife is unable to campaign because of her foreign policy role. She is currently on a two-week tour of Asia and Australasia that includes stops in Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Australia. In Siem Reap in Cambodia yesterday, Mrs Clinton met a group of about 50 victims of human trafficking at an American-funded facility and promised continued American support. Related Articles Palin hits back at Karl Rove's claim she lacks 'gravitas' Barack Obama's world turns upside down Obama's victory in pictures Prepare...